Apropos of nothing

Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. 

The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! 

Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist".  Probably not true, in fact - but certainly I was an early adopter.

Now one of the things that always mystified me back then was this idea that taking pop seriously was some sort of radically new gesture, a daring step forward into Enlightenment, leaving behind the Bad Old Days when Rockism had our minds in chains.

It always felt like a myth, this idea that before the pro-pop insurgency of the 2000s, music journalists universally treated pop with disdain; that there was never any enthusiasm or respect for artists operating in the commercial mainstream, no serious discussion of chartpop. 

I don't think this was even true in America, where generalism had long been a fairly established mode. But I know for sure that in the U.K. it was an utterly commonplace occurrence. For certain writers, it was a shtick, a specialist territory they set themselves up in. For others, it would be part of having a well-rounded approach to being both a fan/consumer and a commentator/thinker. 

So let's take a little journey into the Not-So-Dark Ages before poptimism came along to sort everything out. 

In the Nineties, on the UK music press, you often had people writing excited pieces about R&B, or all that Eurobeat pop-dance (Snap, etc). Sometimes, admittedly, with a contrarian, look-at-me aspect, to them. But the reason that that was irritating, from my point of view, was because there was absolutely nothing audaciously against-the-grain about taking a pro-pop position - either with specific instances of pop or the entire field. That  move was already well established, had an extensive history...



In the Eighties, New Pop emerged right at the start of the decade. There were two ideas here: that 

A/ it was cool and valid to "go pop" (the move made by ABC, Scritti Politti, New Order, Style Council, et al), and that

 B/ pop already contained great stuff  (all the glorious disco-funk of the era, for starters, but also things like Dollar, the mascot group for New Pop ideologues, the Annie/Robyn of their day ... You would even get writers sticking up for Bucks Fizz). 

New Pop thinking was virtually hegemonic on the rock press for some years, although it's true that the readership was not as taken with it as the writers. It's worth recalling that the term  "rockism" itself was coined in 1980, by Pete Wylie of Wah!, as a sort of auto-critique from within postpunk rock culture. It was propagated energetically by Paul Morley and others, and rapidly became the mindset of perhaps a score or more critics working on the rock weeklies and the new style magazines (where anti-rockism became dogma).  (I won't bring Smash Hits into the discussion - its only innovation was that arch, taking-nothing-too-seriously mode). 

NME's Richard Cook with a rave review for ABBA's best-of (1982)

But in the second half of the Eighties, even when there was a backlash within the rock weeklies and the post-postpunk scene against pop gloss -  a return to indie / underground values, to harder-darker and more abrasive music - the pro-pop move remained a stock critical maneuver. I remember colleagues speaking up for Aha, or Curiosity Killed the Cat, or Mel & Kim...  Pet Shop Boys were widely lauded... Everyone liked Janet Jackson...   I'm sure I made that move a few times myself. 

As for black music, it was very much on the inkie weeklies menu  - hip hop, funk, reggae, a bit of R&B, some jazz... African music in quite a big way. Even Sounds covered reggae regularly and surprisingly thoroughly, given its image as an Oi! / heavy metal paper..

In the Seventies - the period that you'd probably imagine to be the absolute darkest age of rockism - the UK music press was actually catholic and remarkably comprehensive in its coverage. The weeklies conceived of themselves as music newspapers (Melody Maker, in the early 70s, was based in Fleet Street) with an interest (in both senses of the word) in reporting and analysing everything. It was their job. So Melody Maker - according to received wisdom the "progressive paper" - would routinely cover things like Osmondmania, David Cassidy, the Jackson Five, Isaac Hayes, early disco, etc, with depth, intelligence, and respect - alongside all the things you'd expect (Hatfield and the North, Steeleye Span,  Nucleus). One week, there'd be a centre spread on Stockhausen or Sun Ra; the next a 4000 word investigation into the top producers of teenybop, or a report on the new boom for fan clubs. 

Oh look, this has just popped up at Rock's Back Pages - the late Colin Irwin, who did the folk column in Melody Maker, does a report on the funk scene at clubs like Lacy Lady and with deejays like Chris Hill (RIP). This is in 1976, three or four full years before Danny Baker would make much rhetorical hay at NME out of how the true working class Britfunk scene isn't A Certain Ratio / Gang of Four but the jazz-funk scene with its All-Dayers and Weekenders as hosted by Hill and other jocks. 

Both NME and Melody Maker reported on Northern Soul - Sounds I'm almost certain did too. "If it moves, cover it".

MM's Richard Williams wrote circa 1976 one of the most perceptive pieces about dub reggae and its revolutionary implications. 

There were also individual writers who -  as the Richard Williams Melody Maker rave review of Gary Glitter below shows -   would sometimes put forth the against-the-grain arguments so familiar to us from the poptimistic kerfuffle of the 2000s.  

The NME was just as expansive: even during the sombre height of postpunk, they'd run cover stories on Michael Jackson and Giorgio Moroder, big features on Earth Wind and Fire and Chic...  as mentioned Danny Baker's enthused reports on the UK's burgeoning jazz-funk scene... passionate and informed coverage of reggae from roots 'n' dub to lover's rock ...  an appreciation of Abba... 

I'm not so familiar with the US rock press of the 1970s but I have seen a fair few issues of Creem, and in there you will find writers making arguments celebrating, say, The Sweet, in terms of pure pop excitement, brilliantly effective if  manufactured thrills, etc.  

In the Sixties... well, rock criticism is nascent and unformed at that point, so I'm not sure there's a rock/pop divide clearly marked such that people could dramatise themselves around it. People tended to use 'rock' and 'pop' interchangeably.  

Still, there is an argument  for seeing Nik Cohn as the Original Poptimist, albeit a gloomy one in so far as he thinks Pop's energy flash and pulp heroics have been stifled by the pompous self-seriousness of Rock. 

It is notable that the first two major youth-music books by British writers both use the word "pop" in their titles: Cohn's Pop From the Beginning, and George Melly's Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts. Also worth noting, as regards differences between the UK and the USA: Cohn's book was retitled for the American market as Rock From the Beginning. 

Perhaps the battle the poptimists keep on fighting is a America-specific problem that regenerates itself perennially;  whereas the battle never needed to be fought in the U.K. in so far as pop has historically not - most of the time -  been a dirty word, a synonym for phony and fabricated - at least for most sensible people. 

So, essentially, the pro-pop approach - in both its attention-seeking mode and conscientious fair-minded generalist mode - has a history going back over fifty years, at least - possibly longer.  

It's easy to see why the notion of a Dark Ages would be appealing, should you fancy seeing yourself - or  being seen - as a light-bringer, someone on the side of Right: boldly rectifying longstanding injustices, and breaking new intellectual ground in the process too ...  

But this narrative is, to a startling degree, a myth. 

Williams making the "don't knock the greasy kids's stuff" move - and even in '72, far from the first to do it.

the trash aesthete move - Glitter can't be denied "except by impossible snobs who lack any real feeling for rubbish"

"he does it to those kids in just the way they want it done" is unfortunate language, with hindsight... 

Prototype Thoughts on Melody Maker (late 60s / early 70s incarnation) as the Original Poptimist Paper (or at least, the Original Generalist Paper). The key general point is this, which possibly explains the rise of poptimism at the start of the 2000s as a response to a narrowing of focus in the UK music press (coupled also with the rise of a Pitchfork in its then indie-ist form): 

... By the mid-90s, music magazine publishing had fragmented so much that this kind of catholic comprehensiveness was no longer tenable. When the music weeklies didn't have hardly any rivals, they could cover rock but also its adjacent genres - soul, dance, etc. But as time went by they got less and less benefit from these attempts at being comprehensive. Their core readership wasn't interested, or was actively turned off; meanwhile, the genre-ist fans gravitated towards the the genre-ist magazines.

....It's considered righteous for people to criticise NME.... or the early, pre-reformed Pitchfork for their failures to cover certain genres, or when they did cover them, lambast them for doing it in a tokenistic way, or for imposing their own rockist biases. Failing to "understand them on their own terms".... 

But you never got hordes of rocktimists railing against The Source or Vibe for their failure to cover Queens of the Stone Age or Arcade Fire, did you?    Nobody ever expected Smash Hits to take on Terrorizer or The Wire type music. No one thinks less of Mixmag and DJ for their lack of "engagement" with indie.  Did Blues and Soul ever put MBV on its front cover, like MM put Bobby Brown on its?...  

It was totally fine for all those magazines to base their coverage on calculations about what their market was, what their readership was interested in.  Yet the accusation of incomplete catholicity always get leveled at the rock magazines. The onus is on rock criticism.